FANBOWA?

My very first post on this blog was about FANBOYS. In that post I mused about where this mnemonic might have originated. This evening, as I was reading The Sound on the Page, by Ben Yagoda, I thought I had found my answer: Oliver Strunk. When Yagoda quoted from The Elements of Style, “place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause,” I thought, "of course!"

Strunk illustrates with two examples—one with and and one with but—before continuing with the following prescript.

"Two-part sentences of which the second member is introduced by as (in the sense of because), for, or, nor, and while (in the sense of and at the same time) likewise require a comma before the conjunction."

In other words, Strunk, while largely agreeing with the spirit of FANBOYS, differs in the details. Firstly, where we currently have FANBOYS, he had FANBOWA. (For Strunk, so was an adverb requiring a semicolon; yet is not mentioned.)

Secondly, nowhere does Strunk write, "coordinating conjunction". Instead he distinguishes between conjunctions that join independent clauses, and other conjunctions that “likewise require a comma”. This suggests that he thought for, nor, or, while, and as introduced a dependent clause, though I can’t think why or and nor are listed here.

So The Elements of Style (Geoff Pullum has called it, a "vile little assemblage of stupid advice about usage") is a little confused about or and nor, but doesn't seem to be the source I was looking for. This clue does suggest, however, that FANBOYS has its origin sometimes after 1935, when TEOS came out.

BTW, Schoolhouse Rock had it right: and, but, or & nor.

Discriminatory etymology

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John Steckley, a professor of anthropology here at Humber College, has just released a book entitled, Full Circle: Canada's First Nations, from which he was kind enough to send me the chapter on Aboriginal languages. In the chapter he points out how ridiculous it would be to simply specify that a word is of European background. Yet that, he claims, is essentially what many dictionaries do when they give the etymology of, for example, moccasin as N. Amer. Ind.

My first reaction was "how true!" followed very closely by "really?" All of the dictionaries that I could find in the house and online gave reasonable etymologies for moccasin. For example, Dictionary.com gives, "Origin: 1605-15, Americanism; - Virginia Algonquian - Proto-Algonquian *maxkeseni." Steckley gives sources, but since I only had chapter 4, I didn't have the bibliography and couldn't follow them up. I was suspicious.

This afternoon, we were down at the bookstore with the kids, so I decided to check out some other dictionaries. Sure enough, two or three had etymologies as general as "Amerind". Most Oxford dictionaries were fine, but the Oxford School Dictionary, marketed to children, had the trivialising etymology--this, despite having Greek and Dutch elsewhere. Surprisingly, it wasn't just dictionaries for the junior linguist that were at fault. The Collins Canadian Paperback Dictionary was fine, but the Collins Canadian Dictionary and Thesaurus, a big, seriously adult-looking hardcover wasn't.

Steckley does a good job clearing up the ridiculous notion, inexplicably propagated by these dictionaries, that there is but a single American Indian language, and then goes on to take apart a number of other common misconceptions about the languages of Canada's First Nations.

Writing systems and learning to read

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Over at Language Log, Bill Poser oversimplifies things somewhat when he writes,

If you have a straightforward phonological writing system and teach children to make use of that structure, most children will learn to read and write without great difficulty. The idea that learning to read and write is a lengthy and painful process is a pathology of our writing system and educational system, not a universal truth.

There are certainly grains of truth in there, but in the case of English, the phonology of the language is largely to blame for our less-than-transparent writing system. Bill puts forward the eminently sensible "frog's feet" syllabic writing system for Carrier. Would such a system work for English?

Frog's feet has roughly 200 characters representing the intersection of 6 vowel sounds and 33 consonants (not 6 x 33 because not all can be used together). By contrast, if we take the counts from the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary by John C. Wells for General American English, we have 25 consonants and 19 vowels, with one additional consonant and three additional vowels for foreign words. With a few exceptions, all of these can be used in isolation (i.e., word-initially for vowels or, for consonants, before another consonant or as the final letter in a word.) Furthermore, most of the consonants can be followed by any of the vowels. (See here for more phonotactic rules.) I can't be bothered to count the exceptions, so I'll estimate by reducing the counts by 20%. Under this estimate, you would need somewhere between 300 and 350 characters to replicate the frog's feet system for English.

Moreover, the elegant simplicity of the Carrier system is impractical for English. My understanding is that frog's feet uses a basic shape for each consonant, and simply rotates these to indicate the relevant vowel (diatrics are also emloyed). When you have only 6 vowels, this works beautifully. When you have 19...

Finally, the Carrier system, with its occasional isolated consonant is mostly syllabic, but with alphabetic elements. And it is well documented that syllables are something that humans can fairly easily notice and learn to read. On the other hand, the English system, with its higglety-pigglety consonant doubles, triplets, and even quadruples (e.g., sixths), would remain largely alphabetic. Alphabetic systems require phonemic awareness, and this is harder to attain than syllabic awareness.

So, Bill's right about frog's feet being easy to learn, but to suggest that a similar system would actually be practical for English, let alone make it any easier to read, strikes me as unlikely.

[Japanese also employs a syllabic writing system (actually two parallel systems) along with the kanji logographs. The Japanese system is even more compact than the Carrier one as Japanese has a smaller complement of phonemes and all syllables are either V or CV except for tsu and n. Consequently, they have only 52 characters (along with one major and one minor diatric mark).]

Different kinds of questions

Recently I was speaking with a colleague about her plans for her new low-level class. When she said that she intended to focus on question formation for the first few weeks, I asked her with some trepidation how she would be sequencing the various kinds of questions. It turned out that she didn't know what the various kinds of questions were. And she wasn't the first.

Broadly, there are yes/no questions (e.g., Is it hot in here?) and so-called wh-questions (e.g., Where do you live?). Leaving aside minor forms such as tags (e.g., It's hot, isn't it) and echoes ( e.g., You're what?) Yes/no questions can be divided into those with a need for do support and those without.

If the corresponding affirmative form of the question has only a lexical verb and no auxiliary verb, then the question form requires the insertion of (do) before the subject.

• He likes this. -> Does he like this?
• He went to Halifax. -> Did he go to Halifax?

In contrast, if the sentence has no lexical verb or includes an auxiliary, then do support is not required. Instead, the non-lexical verb is fronted (i.e., moved in front of the subject).

• You will marry me. -> Will you marry me?
• He is nice. -> Is he nice?

A similar difference exists in wh- questions; lexical verbs cannot be fronted, so, where fronting is required, do or another auxiliary is needed.

• He plays in Etobicoke. -> Where does he play?
• He has played in Etobicoke. -> Where has he played?

But, not all wh- questions are the same. The wh- words come in three flavours: pronoun (who, what), determinative (which, what), and adverb (where, when, why, how). The adverbs always require an auxiliary verb before the subject.

• Where did he go?
• How should I do it?
• Why is that happening?

In contrast, question formation with the pronouns and determiners differs depending on whether the question is about the subject or about some other noun within the sentence. If the question relates to the subject, the result is the canonical subject-verb-object sentence.

• The door went bang. -> What went bang?
• Brett can get the pizza. -> Who can get the pizza?
• This pencil is the best. -> Which pencil is the best?

Otherwise, you end up with the same situations as above with the adverbs.

• I banged the door. -> What did you bang?
• Brett can get the pizza for us. ->Who can Brett get the pizza for?
• She likes that pencil. -> Which pencil does she like?

With all this to take into account, I wonder how a teacher could possibly plan a coherent set of lessons on question formation without understanding how questions are formed. Make no mistake; I don't blame my colleague. But I do worry about TESL training programs.

Teacher training big on how, missing the what

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A few weeks ago Bill Poser claimed that (Canadian and US) teachers aren't taught how to teach reading.

"Even in states and provinces where phonics is used, teachers are generally not given the training necessary to teach it. Here in British Columbia, for example, students training to be teachers read a little bit about approaches to the teaching of reading and discuss them, but they are never taught what the sounds of English are, what the letter-to-sound rules of English are, or how to bring about phonemic awareness. Teachers who lack this knowledge are hard put to do a good job of teaching phonics."

I asked a colleague who had recently completed teacher's college here in Ontario whether this reflected her own experience there; she basically concurred with Poser.

"In teacher's college we learn how to teach different reading strategies, but we don't learn a lot about phonetics or how to teach (it). I guess in 8 months with placement included there is not enough time to go in depth into everything."

The other day, the Toronto Star had an article indicating that there is a glut of applicants to teacher's college and of recent graduates. This will likely have some positive effect on the quality of the individuals coming out, but without the education and training, there's little hope that these folks will be any better equipped to teach reading.

(By the way, I remember hearing of some irreverent wag, commenting on the difference between training and education with a simple question. "How many of you would accept sex training in public schools?")

Grammar course for ESL teachers

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The Guardian is touting an online grammar course for prospective ESL teachers offered by a private training company called Cactus. There's no doubt that more teachers need such a course; I just hope that they don't end up learning that there are no verbs in phrases and other similar nonsense. The course is accredited through the Open and Distance Learning Quality Council, an organisation that I'm unfamiliar with, but which appears to be legitimate.

John Sinclair (1933-2007)

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Elena Tognini Bonelli wrote the following obituary:

Yesterday was a very sad day for the world of linguistics. John Sinclair (b. 14 June 1933) died at his home in Florence, aged 73. He will be deeply missed by his family, his colleagues and his many friends. His death is a terrible loss to everyone who knew him. Friends and colleagues are welcome to the interment of the urn which will be at the Cimitero degli Inglesi in Florence on 28 March at 3.30pm.

John was an outstanding scholar, a first-generation modern corpus linguist and clearly one of the most open-minded and original thinkers in the field. He was Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Birmingham for most of his career and founder of the ground-breaking COBUILD project in lexical computing which revolutionised lexicography in the 1980s and resulted in a new generation of corpus-driven dictionaries and reference materials for English language learners. After his retirement from Birmingham John moved to Italy where he became President of the Tuscan Word Centre, an association devoted to promoting the scientific study of language. On the short intensive courses that the Tuscan Word Centre offered, John very generously shared his original ideas about language and linguistics with generations of younger scholars, introduced numerous students to the fascinating world of corpora and inspired many new ideas for future research in linguistics. He was an Honorary Life Member of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain and a member of the Academia Europaea. John held an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Gothenburg, and Honorary Professorships in the Universities of Jiao Tong, Shangai and Glasgow.

He is gone now and it will be very hard to get used to it. John's last email to me just a couple of days ago ended "Very brief note tonight; more to follow." I will miss him.

DST

John Sakamoto, citing webexhibits.org, writes,

"Daylight Saving Time is grammatically correct. "Saving" acts as a participle, which modifies "time" and tells us about its nature. However, the phrase itself is inaccurate, since no daylight is actually saved. It is merely shifted from morning to evening."

Daylight Saving Time is indeed grammatically correct, as is Daylight Savings Time. The analysis is, however, faulty as the caveat implies. If anything at all is being saved, it's daylight, not time. So, to say that 'saving' is modifying 'time' strikes me as very odd.

I see two possible analyses. One is that it is time for saving daylight, analogous to time for reading the paper. Under this strategy you get daylight-saving time, analogous to paper-reading time. The s doesn't work here.

The other strategy is to analyse saving(s) as a noun, as in a one-time saving or a savings account. Under this strategy, daylight is a noun modifying the second noun saving(s). Now, if we look at the analogous cost saving(s), we find that the plural is more than twice as common as singular, but neither is rare.

But we're not finished. The noun phrase, daylight saving(s) is itself modifying time. While there are cases where a plural noun is used as a modifier (e.g., antiques show), it is far more common for such modifiers to be singular. Indeed, with our analogous cost saving(s), we find cost saving measures is roughly five times as common as cost savingS measures. Still, this doesn't rule out the possibility of the plural form if one wants to emphasise that there is a saving every day, as discussed here.

By the way, the daylight is saved for many individuals who would otherwise be sleeping through it in the morning, thus wasting it.

To revivify or condemn

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Over at Language Log, folks are wondering aprint (here and here) how prescriptivist rules get formulated in the first place. What moves a usage raven maven to take umbrage at something that has seemed perfectly innocuous to generations of English speakers?

Well, the other day, I came across revivify in a long but fascinating NYT Magazine article. I had never seen the word before and read it \ri-ˈvīvə-ˌfī\ instead of the correct \rē-ˈvi-və-ˌfī\. My reflex reaction was "what a silly and pointless neologism! What's wrong with revive?". But a quick search of the dictionary, reveals it's nothing of the sort.

While revive is older (circa 1400), revivify is attested from 1665. Moreover, English speakers have been able to vivify something (another new word for me) since 1535. That's a trick that revive can't do. And while both revive and revivify mean bring back to life, revivify seems to have a link to vivid that revive is simply lacking. Still, revivify is fairly rare, appearing almost never in speech and only about once every 10 million words in print.

So, here I am at a crossroads. Do I abashedly admit that I was ignorant and unobservant and welcome revivify into my vocabulary, or do I try to save face by condemning it as a mere florid redundancy? The second choice, pathetic though it is, may be one possible avenue by which language items fall into disrepute.

A woman the source of the 'he' rule?

In following up Arnold Zwicky's by-the-way attribution of the rule that only he should be used as an indefinite pronoun (e.g. Every person should make sure he...) to Lindley Murray in 1795, I came across an article, which antedates that instance by 50 years and attributes the rule to Ann Fisher.

Synesis across the Atlantic

I promise this is my last post on Richard Firsten's Grammatically Speaking column for quite some time. Again, in his most recent column, he takes a question about grammatically singular nouns, such as team and crew, with plain present tense verbs instead of the third-person s forms. This is called synesis (discussed earlier here). In response, Firsten writes

In a way, the BrE is more consistent than AmE. AmE has the police are and people are, and it's not so unusual to hear the singular or plural verb form after family. When talking about the family as a group of individuals, AmE tends to use the plural verb form; when thinking of the family as a whole unit, AmE uses the singular verb form.

I'm afraid, I don't see Richard's point about police and people. Perhaps he is confusing irregular plurals with singular collective nouns? Either way, it's not just AmE; You would never find the police is or the people is in BrE either, where police and people are the subject.

And is family as group versus a number of individuals really an AmE issue? In the British National Corpus, the string family + (3rd person singular verb) is over 1.5 times more common than the string family + (plain form verb). Not all of these are relevant, of course. They include sentences in which family is not the subject (e.g., The problems with the family are numerous & The nice thing about this family is...). Still, this distinction is clearly available to speakers of English on both sides of the Atlantic and there's no evidence in Firsten's column that BrE is more consistent than AmE (though it may be).

Another of Firsten's fumbles

Forgive me if I appear to be picking on Richard Firsten. It's just that if the guy who answers teachers' grammar questions for the largest organisation of English language teachers in the world can't do better than here, here, here, and here, then we're in trouble.

In his latest column, he agrees with Gail Sepúlveda of Monterrey, Mexico that the following are partitive genitives:

a pair of pants
a cup of coffee

Really? A partitive construction is one in which there is a part to whole relationship, as in some of the people. In this example, there is a set of people and some identifies a subset of those people (i.e., one part of the group). The same thing applies to non-count nouns, for example a little of the wine.

But that's not the relationship in either of the above phrases. Consider the difference between a pair of the pants and a pair of pants. The first is partitive, the second non-partitive. The same applies to the cup of coffee example.

To be honest, I'd never paid any attention to the term partitive though I know I've seen it a number of times before. Yesterday, I wouldn't have been able to tell one from a flux capacitor. But it just takes a few minutes' effort to find out. Unfortunately, too many of us English language teachers seem to lack the curiosity or wherewithal to identify and use good references.

Headed back again

Back in December, I discussed Richard Firsten's analysis of "She's headed for the beach." In his newest Grammatically Speaking column, he tries to explain that in the last column, he didn't mean that headed was an adjective, but merely that it was being used "adjectivally". It's not really clear what he means here, but it seems that, following this example, he would consider all participles in passive constructions like 'he was eaten' and all in progressives like 'he is eating' to be an "adjectival phrase". I don't find this either convincing or helpful.

Richard goes on to say that "is headed for the beach" is a statal passive. According to Huddleston's Introduction to the Grammar of English, "a statal passive ... attributes a certain property to the (subject), that of being in the state resulting from (an) event." Huddleston goes on to say that the participles in statal passives can also appear after other copulative verbs, as in "the vase appeared / seemed / looked broken." Neither of these properties hold true for our headed example. Being headed for the beach is not the result of an event, nor can we say "She seems headed for the beach" (a web search will turn up thousands of hits for "seems headed", but all appear to be headlinese.)

[Update: Upon further consideration, I think this IS a statal passive. I was having serious trouble dissociating the movement entailed in heading for something from the grammatical properties of the sentence. After some thought and research I now think that a defining characteristic of statal vs. dynamic verbs is that you cannot refer to a point inside dynamic verbs without using the progressive. States, in contrast, allow such reference. So we have

• At 2:00 she was headed for the beach. (2:00 is a point inside the state)
• At 2:00 she walked to the beach. (2:00 cannot be a point inside the dynamic occurrence)

To my chagrin, I now believe my initial analysis was incorrect.]

How I learned English Grammar

One of the members of the ETJ list wrote, "I was wondering for those of you who teach grammar...how did you learn grammar?" I thought I might share my journey, such as it has been.

I learned a good deal of grammar in my French immersion school in the early 70s. Of course, that was in French. When I went to Japan and began teaching English, I had a number of basic concepts, but was often at a loss to understand and explain many points. I picked up some more grammar by staying one step ahead of the students in the various textbooks like that one they (used to?) use at Nova. Still, these were not really grammar textbooks per se and what I picked up there was limited.

My first two real grammar books for teachers were Michael Lewis's The English Verb and A Teacher's Grammar: An Approach to the Central Problems of English by R. A. Close, which I just stumbled across during my regular browsing at Kinokuniya.

Later I took Temple University's M.Ed. which includes a course called New Grammars taught by Ken Schaefer. Ken took us through more traditional grammatical analysis, including sentence diagramming, and introduced us to Chomskyan transformational grammar with grammar trees and all that. The main text was The Grammar Book, which is still probably the best course in grammar for English language teachers.

Since then, I have added to my collection the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, which has lots of interesting stats, but suffers from a lack of attention to its theoretical foundation; and the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, which seems to me the current pinnacle of analysis. (This is not to be confused with the terrible Cambridge Grammar of English by Ron Carter and Michael McCarthy.) There is also a smaller textbook for undergrads, A Student's Introduction to English Grammar based on the CGEL.

Finally, whenever there is a grammar question, I do my best to track down an answer and explain it. You learn a great deal teaching others.

Recursion discovered at New Scientist

New Scientist magazine generally does a very good job of reporting science news. They also have a section called Feedback in which people tend to send in random amusing stories, many of which have to do with language. Take, Olaf Lipinski's story about his new shirt:

The other day he bought a shirt with black and white stripes. He was delighted with it until he read the label which says: "Wash dark colours separately".

These are all well and good, but back on Jan. 20, there was the following:

Understanding understanding

READER Stan Courtney tell us that while browsing through Scientific American he came across this in an article about autism: "For neuroscientists, this finding... represents a dramatic change in the way we understand the way we understand."

Courtney says he cannot remember seeing any other sentence like this, in which a repeated phrase actually makes sense. Has anyone else?

The follow up appeared in the Feb. 10 edition:

The way we understand the way we understand

WRITING in response to Stan Courtney's comment on repeated phrases that make sense, such as "the way we understand the way we understand" (20 January), Stewart Haywood tells us: "I watched my daughter standing in front of a mirror this morning, looking at herself looking at herself."

...David Squire's simple submission "This sentence contains 'this sentence contains'" comes as something of a relief.

Many other readers offered their own versions of this linguistic oddity, but space prevents us publishing them all, so let us conclude with the wisdom of the physicist Richard Feynman, who was there before us in this, as he was in so many things. Tim Cowell was the first of many to draw our attention to a statement made by Feynman when he was a student, which went something like this: "I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder!" He repeated this to himself over and over again, apparently, as a way of sending himself off to sleep.

All of which makes you wonder: is this a phenomenon that has just caught the attention of one of the world's leading science news magazines? Do they really know so little about language and linguistics that they are unaware how fundamental the idea of recursion is? They have, after all, written about it before and here. Admittedly, this is a special limited type of recursion, but it's still pretty obvious, isn't it? I mean, my five-year-old son once told me a "story about a story about a story about a story..." and found it terrifically funny.

Can you imagine somebody writing in and saying, "I've recently noticed that light behaves both as a wave and as a particle"? But then I guess we expect people to know more about physics than about linguistics, a fact that Mark Liberman is always lamenting.

More here
A particularly disgusting (I'm not kidding!) example of this type of recursion is here (click at your own risk), other related Language Log posts being here and here. Escher made much use of recursion in his drawings, including the special case of the strange loop as illustrated in drawing hands. Finally, GNU is a recursive acronym which means GNU is not UNIX.

Google Scholar & free papers

Last week I was looking for information about using timed lexical decision tests to assess vocabulary. I forget exactly which search terms I used, but one of the papers google scholar recommended was Kempe, V., & MacWhinney, B. (1996). The crosslinguistic assessment
of foreign language vocabulary learning. Applied Psycholinguistics, 17, 149-183. For this paper, Google returned the following options: Cited by 10 - Related Articles - Cached - Web Search - BL Direct

None of these will actually take you to a copy of the paper unless you or your insitution are subcribed to BL Direct, which might lead you to suspect that there is no free version available. If, however, you go to Brian MacWhinney's web site, you'll find a free copy there for your perusal.

Still, I don't think there's any kind of sweetheart deal going on here. Danny Sullivan on searchenginewatch.com writes,

"Google says, by the way, that it does not earn money off of any new subscriptions generated between searchers and publishers."

And, in fact, if you do your google searches unflavoured, you can find the free version of the Kempe & MacWhinney paper easily. Its not even that Google Scholar never links to free papers, as the following results demonstrate:

Attention Control and Ability Level in a Complex Cognitive Skill: Attention Shifting and Second- … - group of 4 »
N Segalowitz, S Frenkiel-Fishman - Memory & Cognition, 2005 - www-psychology.concordia.ca
One of the most interesting research results of the last half-century regarding
skilled performance is that what primarily distinguishes experts from ...
Cited by 3 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search - BL Direct

So there's something odd happening here.

Some more evidence of the weirdness is that GS doesn't seem to know everything that just plain google knows. For example, if I copy the first line of the abstract and search for that in quotes, GS just shrugs its shoulders, while bare bones google serves up the required paper with its usual alacrity.

What's up? Who knows, but if you don't find a free version of a paper on GS, don't give up. It may still be out there.

Early pedantry

Whenever my 2-year old is offered rice milk, she rolls her eyes and corrects me with the brand name 「ライスミルク」じゃないよ。「ライスドリームー」。(It's not 'rice milk', it's "Rice Dreeeaam".)

College Association of Language and Literacy Annual Conference

This year, Humber College ITAL (don't ask about the ITAL bit), where I work, is hosting the College Association of Language and Literacy Annual Conference May 29 – May 31. CALL is a provincial association of college teachers, most of whom teach composition, literature, and ESL.

I'll be hosting a panel called 'Benchmarking the benchmarks'.

There have been discussions between the Ontario College Heads of Language and the government about benchmarking college English language programs and writing programs against the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB). This panel will explore the benefits and drawbacks of such a step and whether the CLB is the right tool for these programs.

If you have any thoughts on the topic, I'd appreciate your comments between now and the end of May. Also, let me know if you might drop by.

The differences

Over on the ETJ list, we had the following question:

A JTE asked me if I could explain the differences/similarities between:
(be over & end)
(call for & need)
(start & leave) as in:The best thing is to (start / leave) at once.

Rather odd question, I thought, but I'll give it a shot.

As for call for vs. need, perhaps the difference can best be explained by contrasting them in
"The forecast ________ more rain." The similarity is that they are both completely ungrammatical in that context, so you need the third person 's', producing

1st person: "The forecast need more rain."
2nd person: "Hang on! That's not grammatically correct."
3rd person: "Shhhhh! That's not PC anymore."

Moving on to be over and end, though very similar, one can detect a slight change in nuance, which is brought out nicely by putting them in the following context:

"the dog bit me on my rear _____"

In the final pair, there isn't enough context to really tell start and leave apart, but if we add one sentence to the beginning, it becomes much more obvious, to wit,

"I think I'm going to fart."
"The best thing is to start / leave at once."

When science slams into the uninformed newspaper

The headline on this International Herald Tribune story about people misconstruing the research agenda of Charles Roselli is really a cheap shot.

When science slams into the uninformed blogger

Oh, the bloggers are uninformed. But if you read the article, you find that, "the news media storm reached its zenith last month, when The Sunday Times in London published an article under the headline 'Science Told: Hands Off Gay Sheep.'" Who's uninformed?

Truth be told, "the controversy spilled into the blog world, with attacks on Roselli." But look at the reactions when the problems were pointed out to the newspaper.

The authors of the Sunday Times article, Chris Gourlay and Isabel Oakeshott, referred questions to a managing editor, who they said was traveling and could not be reached.

The blogosphere, in contrast reacted like this:

Roselli and Newman were able to persuade some prominent bloggers, including Andrew Sullivan, the openly gay journalist who writes a column for Time.com, to correct postings that had uncritically quoted the Sunday Times article.

They also found an ally in the blog world: a scientist who writes under the pseudonym Emptypockets and has taken up Roselli's cause. That blogger, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he said a public stand could hurt his career, said he had been cheered by the number of bloggers who dropped their opposition when presented with the facts. "As soon as you tell them this isn't real, they take it back quickly," he said.

No verbs in phrases

I was consulting the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics for a clear definition of phrase. It refered me to clause, where I found the following definition: "A phrase is a group of words which form a grammatical unit." Fine, so far. "A phrase does not contain a finite verb." Oops!

I assume what the authors (Jack Richards, John Platt & Heidi Platt) are trying to do here is distinguish phrase from clause and to specify just what kind of grammatical unit we are talking about. But this limitation puts us in serious trouble, as the last part of the definition should make clear. "Phrases are usually classsified according to their central word or HEAD. e.g., NOUN PHRASE¹, VERB PHRASE, etc." (By the way, the note on noun phrase seems to be unresolved, as far as I can tell.)

So, verb phrases are types of phrases, but only when they do not include a finite verbs. But if we look up verb phrase, we find that it is a "part of a sentence that includes the main verb." Just be be absolutely sure we're not missing something, let's have a look at the example in which, we are told, everything except Tom is the verb phrase.

Tom gave a watch to his daughter.

Clearly, gave is a finite verb.

And we never did get to find out what kind of grammatical unit phrases are, did we? Sigh.

Simple English Wiktionary

The Simple English Wiktionary is coming along quite nicely. We're at 1427 entries now. Though that doesn't seem like many, we only had just shy of 400 when I joined last April. My goal is to get a good basic vocabulary in there, about 2000-3000 words plus the Academic Word List. If anybody's interested in contributing, contact me ( b r e t t . r e y n o l d s @ h u m b e r . c a) or just head on over and have at it.

If you're interested in using the data to study vocabulary, there's an open-source program called jVLT that can import the data from the SEWikt for study and testing. I don't think the importing program has been uploaded yet, but I can send you the data if you're interested. Again, let me know.

More Russell Smith

Not only does Russell Smith not know when he's wrong; he doesn't even seem to know when he's right. In his latest column ("Two small words, one large headache", Jan 4, 2007), he writes,

"The downside to this pontificating job is that when one makes a grammatical mistake, it makes one look particularly silly. And readers are likely to point it out with a pleasure verging on glee. (As well they should.) So, yes, it was inelegant of me to begin last week's column with the sentence, 'Readers write to me about perceived errors which I don't always see as errors myself.' Although many language authorities increasingly accept "which" in this role, strictly speaking the 'which' should be a 'that.'"

And when one accepts the criticism that a perfectly grammatical usage is a mistake, one looks even sillier.

The facts: (mostly from Merriam Webster's Usage Dictionary)
That was used to introduce relative clauses (both restrictive and non-) in early middle English, while which began to be used as a relative pronoun only in the 1300s. Later, it gained currency and within 300 years there was little to distinguish the two. Thereafter, that fell completely out of use in this context for a period, only to later return in its full role. This was followed by a gradual fall out of fashion in nonrestrictive relative clauses until it became quite rare in that usage by the early 20th century. Currently, that is not used this way.

It was about then, perhaps slightly earlier, that usage writers, including the Fowler brothers, suggested that, because that was specializing for restrictive relatives, perhaps, which should be reserved for nonrestrictive relatives. Note, this was merely a fancy. There is no historical precedent and there is an overwhelming host of examples from the best writers of the time in contravention of this idea, a fact readily admitted to by Fowler. Even the usage writers who later mistook this suggestion as a rule ignore it, often within pages of asserting it.

Thus, it is neither true that "strictly speaking" that is correct, nor that which is increasingly accepted in this role. In fact, if anything, more and more people, influenced by Microsoft Word's grammar checker, have come to believe that which is incorrect.

Some interesting divergences from the above follow:

That cannot be used when you wish to relativise the object of a preposition in either restrictive or non-restrictive cases unless you "strand" the preposition (which is perfectly grammatical).

The problems of which I’m aware are of a more qualitative type.
*The problems of that I’m aware are of a more qualitative type.
The problems, of which I’m aware, are of a more qualitative type.
*The problems, of that I’m aware, are of a more qualitative type.

And, from Fowler (1908), we get the following:

All that I can do is useless.
*All which I can do is useless.

That which has gone before should be clear.
*That that has gone before should be clear.

Smith also writes,

"and you see the easiest way to tell when you need one and not the other? It's the commas. 'Which' will always be preceded by a comma. . (sic) So there you go: Forget about restrictive and non-restrictive. If your second clause needs commas around it, then introduce it with which. If not, keep it as that. This is going to be the most useful rule you'll ever learn from me."

I certainly hope not. As we've seen, the rule is not true. And even if it were true, it is not useful. How is one to know whether commas should be added? Take for example, the change to FIFA's Laws of the Game, where some well-meaning person, likely at the suggestion of MS Word, has changed a perfectly acceptable sentence to one that is inane, to wit: " A tackle, which endangers the safety of an opponent, must be sanctioned as serious foul play." (Source)

Most overused words

It seems that to get your fifteen minutes of fame in the newspaper, all you have to do is disparage a few words or expressions. So here goes:

2007's most overused word:

T h*

What a stinker of an article. We've been using it for almost 800 years, and frankly I'm sick of it. And it's not just that people throw it willy-nilly in front of almost every noun. They're actually doing more of it. I mean, back in Old English, you had a whole host of articles to appease your every whim:

	Masc.	Fem.	Neut.	Plural
Nom.	se	seo	þæt	þa
Acc.	þone	þa	þæt	þa
Gen.	þæs	þære	þæs	þara
Dat.	þæm	þære	þæm	þæm
Inst.	þy, þon	--	þy, þon	--

(Source)

There's choice for you. Not just one monotonous definite article over and over, but a range of delightfully subtle variation. Unlike today's so-called "modern" English! Oh, no! Lazy, lazy, lazy--that's what we've become. Everything is determined by this blandest of words, usually pronounced without even a real vowel, just lowly schwa, hardly more than a tired grunt.

Indeed, it's time to pluto it. No more T-word! Its bandwagon is timeworn and overburdened. Jump, I say. There are over 50 other determiners in English and it's time to give them their head unencumbered by this hackneyed lexeme.

(This post is T-word free)

Grammar Scammers

After the mess that Russell Smith makes of his language column in the Globe, it's nice to see that Jan Freeman is willing to actually do some research. Hats off to her!

Inter (a time in between)

The Toronto Star is calling on readers to propose a new word for the current unseasonable season. I propose inter (with the stress on the first syllable). It is appropriately ambiguous in terms of climatic expectations, yet suitably meaningful in its timing: a time between fall and spring. Extending the sense of an existing prefix to include a noun is less of a jump than making up a completely new word (e.g., oobleck). Inter also has the homographic verb, which suggests that winter is dead.

An open letter to Russell Smith

Re: You can fax it, just don't write mein The Globe and Mail Dec 28, 2006 pg. R.3

The column in question has some minor correct statements, which you may wish to alter to maintain a coherent style.

You wrote, "if prose deviates in certain crucial ways from standard written English, a style agreed on almost unanimously by various guide-writing authorities, then it becomes confused and unclear."

Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, would seem to disagree with your assertion of conformity. "A characteristic of writing on usage has been, right from the beginning, disagreement among the writers." If nothing else, there are the two main camps: the prescriptivists, who make about as much sense as this column of yours, and the linguists. And the gulf between them is sizable.

You next complained about "issues of logic, such as mixed up verb tenses."

Verb tenses belong to the field of grammar, not logic. Moreover, English only has two: past and present. And they are rarely mixed up by native speakers. Perhaps the problem is that you have mixed up verb tense with verb form. There is, for example, no passive tense, but a passive voice. There's also aspect and mood, and a number of other considerations when deciding on the correct verb form. Tense is but one; please, try not to confound them in the future, lest your writing continue to be confused, unclear, and ambiguous.

Regarding the "useful distinction" between "write me/write to me". The distinction is already there, both in speech, with intonation, and print, with punctuation or italics. Why require a second distinction when it is obvious to everyone that "a letter" is simply elided? Don't you deride redundancy?

As to your claim that graduate doesn't take a direct object, maybe it doesn't in your idiolect (which, by the way, doesn't usually have anything to do with writing like an idiot), but most dictionaries include a transitive sense. In fact, the intransitive usage was new and much derided in the 19th century, though it is now the more common form. The original was "He was graduated from university." Of course, the "graduated university" construction is new and hasn't made inroads into edited prose, but it makes no less sense than the intransitive form. Oh, and didn't you start the column by downplaying the importance of regional differences and being delighted by change? Is it so hard to keep these things in mind for a few hundred words?

Then, there's this utterly astounding bit of nonsense: "Remember that the past participle of 'go' is 'gone' (not 'went,' which is the perfect)." Went is the perfect what? Aspect? As in "I have went?" Perhaps you mean that it is the past, as in past tense. But we've already established that you mix these things up, so I suppose this is just rubbing salt in your wounds.

And you get paid for this?

May I suggest that, in the future, you consult a scholarly work on the subject at hand before embarrassing yourself and your paper with such trash. The previously mentioned Dictionary of English Usage should be your first stop. You should also consult the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, by Huddleston & Pullum. And while you're waiting for those to arrive, hie yourself over to Language Log and spend some time browsing the archives. It may help you to see the error of your ways.

Past participles, strong and weak

My post on waked vs. waken continues to be one of the most popular (not that readership is exactly huge.) Interestingly, it's not just wake that has wreaked/wrought confusion. A few years ago I realised that in spite of the tidy lists of irregular verbs (i.e., ones with strong form conjugations as opposed to the weak -ed form) that I was passing out to my students, there is a good deal of uncertainty about quite a few verbs. Thankfully, most of them are a bit too rare to deal with in class.

For example, let's look at cleave. First of all, we have two quite opposite meanings: 1) split and 2) stick together. Our past tense (preterite) form is cleaved or clove or cleft. And we also have three possible past participle forms: cleaved, cloven, and cleft. "So which is correct?" you may ask. All of them, but usually for different people.

Here's another: if you were out walking in the summer, you might note the smell of a freshly mown lawn and not give the grammar a second thought. But how comfortable would you be saying, "I've just mown the grass"? For me, it would be mowed. And if you walk briskly away thereafter, have you stridden away? Really?

Here are a few that you can try out at home. You might find that putting them in different sentences will give you different results.

abide
bear
befall
beget
bereave
bet
bid
bless
burn
bust
chide
dive
dream
dwell
forbid
forego
forsake
gild
grind
heave
overload
plead
saw
sew
shear
slay
smite
spill
strive
thrive
tread
wet

Grammatically Speaking III: On pronoun agreement

Still with the Dec. 2005 column by Richard Firsten, (see also, here and here), we come to the issue of the following sentence:

• If someone feels that they’ve been unfairly passed over for a promotion, they should speak to their supervisor.

My old professor, Patrick Rosenkjar, at Temple University Japan, is credited with providing the first correct response; to wit, "strictly speaking, in formal situations the sentence you cite is grammatically incorrect because the plural pronouns (they and their) do not agree with their singular antecedent (someone)."

I'm afraid not.

As Mark Liberman writes, "singular they has routinely been used throughout the history of English, by all the best writers, until certain subcases were artificially turned into 'errors' by self-appointed experts. Successively less discriminating pseudo-authorities then generalized the proscription in successively sillier ways, although they have largely been ignored by the users of the language."

Similarly, Merriam Webster's online dictionary has this to say. "The use of they, their, them, and themselves as pronouns of indefinite gender and indefinite number is well established in speech and writing, even in literary and formal contexts."

Firsten still isn't buying it. He says that "strictly speaking" it's wrong. I take this to be based on the single-sense fallacy that often turns up in grammatical prescriptivism (see here). That is, a word has a single meaning and other meanings are wrong. In particular, because they means "two or more people or things that have already been mentioned or are already known about", it couldn't possibly also mean "a person or people of indefinite gender and number." This same argument would hold as ungrammatical it to refer to a person since it is "used to refer to a thing, animal, situation, idea etc that has already been mentioned or is already known about." Remember that every time you identify yourself on the phone.

Grammatically Speaking; Part II

Continuing on from my last post, in the December 2005 Grammatically Speaking column, Richard Firsten provides a number of questionable answers to language teachers' grammar questions. I'll deal with the first here:

"...During the commercial, the voice-over person says "teeth whitening." Shouldn't it be tooth whitening? I find it hard to believe that whoever writes scripts for commercials would make such a glaring grammatical error, but then again, I'm wondering if they have. What do you say?"

Richard is unequivocal in his response. "You’re right; they're wrong; case closed!"

Well, I asked, is there anything wrong with an antiques show? an admissions committee? A Steelers fan? A singles bar? A publications list? Would you really go for "datum bank", "purple person eater", or "arm race"? What is the plural of manservant?

"No," Richard answered. In fact, he had had a paragraph to account for many exceptions to the rule, probably, he said, due to lower frequency of use than something like toothbrush. Blame the editors.

Well, yes and no. I'm glad to see that Richard accepts exceptions, but frequency has nothing to do with it (and couln't you just argue that teeth whitening is low frequency and be done with it?) No, it's a lot more interesting than that. According to Steven Pinker's Words and Rules.

"A simple explanation, based loosely on Kiparsky (1982), might run as follows. Morphological composition of words takes place in several stages. First there is a lexicon of memorized roots, including, according to the word/rule theory, irregular forms. That lexicon supplies the input to rules of regular derivational morphology, which creates complex words (including compounds)out of simple words and morphemes, outputting a stem. Stems are then inputted to a third component, regular inflection, which modifies the word according to its role in the sentence. In simplified form, the architecture of morphology would look like this:

1. Memorized Roots (including irregulars) -->
2. Complex word formation -->
3. Regular inflection

The word mice, stored as a root in the first component, is available as an input to the compounding process in the second component, where it is joined to infested to yield mice-infested. In contrast, rats is not stored as a memorized root in the first component; it is formed from rat by an inflectional rule in the third component, too late to be inputted to the compounding rule in the second. Hence we get rat-infested but not rats-infested. "

This accounts for the roots with irregular plurals (e.g., purple people eater), but what about the regular plurals (e.g., a red rats eater)? Pinker argues that a phrase can be inserted as the first constituent. That is, you have a [red rats] eater rather than a red [rat] eater. He goes on to argue that the plural in expressions like antiques show, admissions committee, and publications list are one-word phrases, built in the first of the three components above. So, if we have this option, when do we choose to make use of it? When, according to Pinker, we want to emphasise the individuality of the publications, etc. You can read all about it, in the chapter, "of mice and men" in Pinker's book Words and Rules.

In the end, as Margaret Atwood writes, "I felt mice-feet of apprehension," when I read Richard Firsten's prohibition. I hate it when people lay down the law when they've just made it up. Why not allow TV copy writers their "teeth whitening"? Because it's wrong. The wordanistas have spoken.

Heading in the wrong direction

Richard Firsten writes a column called "Grammatically Speaking" in Essential Teacher a quarterly TESOL publication. The premise is that English language teachers write in with their grammar questions and Richard answers them.

Although some of his answers are fine, it's not uncommon that he gets it wrong, sometimes shockingly so.

In his most recent column, the first question is why you can say "how good a student he/she is!" but you can't use the same construction with plurals "*How good students they are!"

Richard answers, basically by saying, 'well it doesn't work with plurals,' (more specifically, it works only with countable singulars) which is fair enough. The actual whys behind many of these questions are opaque even to linguists. But it would be helpful to elucidate, pointing out, as the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language does, that you run into the same issue with so/such.

Not so bad! But then he blows it with the next question: [or not. Update: here]
"In the sentence I'm headed for the beach, what part of speech is 'headed'?"

Richard answers in part,

"Some verbs have given birth, so to speak, to adjectival forms that have distanced themselves from the original meaning of the verbs they come from. For example, when you say She's determined to finish the job on schedule or She's very determined, you’re describing the subject, so you can clearly view determined as an adjective. The use of determined in this context doesn't rely on the verb to determine. Similarly, to head for is obviously a verb, but to be headed for can be viewed as an adjectival phrase in that it will describe a person or thing (If the company doesn't change its fiscal policies, it's headed for bankruptcy)."

In "He is Fred" and "He is running", you're also describing the subject, but that doesn't mean there's anything adjectival about them. The test of an adjective is that it share most of the following properties:
-can be graded
-can be modified by 'very'
-can appear both attributively and predicatively
-can appear in a fused head construction (e.g., the *rich* get richer)

All are true for 'determined'.
they're more determined.
they're very determined.
the determined people / they are determined
the determined are hard to beat

All are false for 'headed'.
*they're more headed
*they're very headed
*the headed people / they are headed (for the lake)
*the headed will arrive sooner

Clearly, 'headed' is a verb.

The second part of the question is, "I think that I'm headed for the beach and I'm heading for the beach mean basically the same thing, which is very strange. I can't think of another sentence where you can use the present participle and the past participle and have the meaning be the same."

Richard brings up rumored for some reason I can't seem to fathom (maybe I'm missing something) but doesn't offer any other verbs that follow this pattern. Anyhow I would say that all of the following are at least as similar as the headed/heading pair:

• When the Northern hemisphere is pointed/pointing towards the Sun, the days are longer,
• The hemisphere that is tilted/tilting towards the Sun is warmer because sunlight travels more directly to the Earth’s surface
• Position the hearing aid so that it is faced/facing towards the. sound chamber speaker.

I think now that classes are finished and I'm headed for the holidays, I'll have some more time to blog so you can look forward to a few more posts on the problems with this column.

No Brizendine on Quirks and Quarks

At the end of the Dec 2 edition of Quirks and Quarks on the CBC, Bob McDonald tells us that next week we can look forward to an interview with Dr. Louann Brizendine. Now, Mark Liberman on Language Log has been telling us all about the problems with Brizendine's book, so I thought I'd urge the Q&Q folks to read his posts.

Flash forward to this week's edition and there's nary a word about Brizendine, her book, or her ideas. It would have been nice to have Q&Q expose the problems rather than just sweeping them under the carpet, but at least they didn't just provide her with another vehicle for her baseless claims.

Abhor a bore

Responding to my letter to the Orangeville Banner about abhor , Don Hayward writes,

Dear Editor,

The English language is a twisted thing as exposed in Doc Reynolds letter of Sept. 26. (Columnist, and many others, misusing abhor.)

His exploration of abhor was enlightening and humbling, but it strikes me that he missed a few points. For instance, abhor is pronounced somewhat like "a bore" once the H has been scared out of it. There is plenty around Dufferin to scare the H out of things, especially in an election year. As well, abhorred should not be confused with similar sounding phrases such as "I have a bored hole in my head." (This to go along with the normal ones already there, I suppose.).

However, lest the condition of my head makes me abhorrent to you, let me quickly change hats. Abhor is the evil twin to adore, something we are all familiar with. For instance, the one who adored us in first year Humber College abhorred us a year later, or vice versa if you ended up married.

Doug, your next assignment is to use the word synergy. That should draw Brett out again. Keep it up guys, my television is broken and these are words worth knowing.

Don Hayward,

Shelburne

It's also a bit like adhere, with a backwards b. Kinda makes you feel unglued.

Quite worthy

My aunt, who I greatly respect and whose company I very much enjoy, and I were hashing out the consequences of Geoff Pullum's latest Language Log post the other night, when somehow we got around to the question of quite.

"Unneeded", my aunt said. "At least in writing. Back when I was editing, I would remove it whenever I encountered it. People asked what we'd put in to replace it, and I would ask them what they put in to replace the cobwebs when they swept them from their corners." (I'm going from memory here.)

I had to disagree.

Brian Garner, in Garner's Modern American Usage elucidates the differences in meaning between British and American uses, but declines to opine on quite's utility despite having no such qualms about other words, such as very, which he describes as

"a weasel word. This intensifier, which functions as both an adjective and an adverb, surfaces repeatedly in flabby writing. In almost every context in which it appears, its omission would result in at most a negligible loss."

I'm not sure whether Garner actually sees a difference between quite and very, simply hasn't noticed quite, or had reached his word limit for his book. At any rate, to my mind, there is quite a role for quite. As the 405th most common word form in written academic English, clearly it's got something behind it. But maybe that's only the mediocre writers. How about the greats?

Well, Bram Stoker's Dracula has just shy of 100 instances of quite including,

"I begin to get new lights on certain things which have puzzled me. Up to now I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he made Hamlet say, "My tablets! Quick, my tablets! 'tis meet that I put it down," etc., For now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me."

Speaking of Shakespeare, the bard thought quite worthy enough to redouble in Hamlet.

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, scholar’s, soldier’s, eye, tongue, sword,
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observ’d of all observers,–quite, quite down!

And it is not limited to fiction, Charles Darwin, in laying out the foundations of modern biology, wrote,

"In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. Nevertheless, such a conclusion, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory, until it could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration."

And of course, going through old e-mails from my aunt, I found numerous instances of quite.

So, should it stay or should it go? In my readings, I have certainly found places where quite adds little, but often it conveys something that is lacking without it: degree.

But, if I am wrong, and quite and very are to be ditched, should we not also get rid of all degree qualifiers--altogether, absolutely, completely, entirely, fully, perfectly, thoroughly, totally, utterly and wholly dispose of them? Regardless of how badly we may wish to use them? How bitterly disappointed we might be to see them go? How deeply we would miss them? Or is there a distinction I'm missing? Perhaps this was why Garner just focussed his attack on 'very'; it was bid to weasel his way off the slippery slope.

Many vs. a lot

Over on the ETJ list, Nick M. says that his student was marked wrong for answering "Yes, I have many teachers," to the question, "Do you have many teachers?" Nick wonders if there's some grammar rule that he's missing.

No, grammatically, "I have many teachers" is fine.

Stylistically, however, it is rather stilted, with 'a lot of' being preferred.

Pragmatically, it is both redundant in it's repetition of "(I) have many teachers" and uncooperative in it's failure to provide a shred more information than the surface form of the question requires. A more pragmatically appropriate answer would be something like, "Eight, if you can believe it."

Arnold Zwicky undertakes a quick survey of 'much' vs. 'a lot' over on Language Log. I think the issues around 'many' are quite similar; indeed, Zwicky touches on them in his explorations.

Can you say, "a lot of bunk?"

Over on the ETJ list, a member writes, in part,

I was brought up in a midwest family where "a lot" meant a piece of ground, and not "many". Different generation grammar usage?...

We also learned that "Can I go to the store?" brought the answer "Yes, you can, ...but you may not."

No doubt, the parents thought they were "protecting" the language (or perhaps the children). There is, however, absolutely no grounds for this except the false idea that words have only a single sense. Clearly they don't. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English gives 31 senses of work and that's just the verb. Lot similarly, if less spectacularly, has a number of common senses; I wonder what the father would have called a parcel of articles offered as one item in an auction? Can, too, has multiple uses, including ability, requests, possibility, and permission.

Merriam Webster's has this to say:

"Can and may are most frequently interchangeable in senses denoting possibility; because the possibility of one's doing something may depend on another's acquiescence, they have also become interchangeable in the sense denoting permission. The use of can to ask or grant permission has been common since the 19th century and is well established, although some commentators feel may is more appropriate in formal contexts. May is relatively rare in negative constructions (mayn't is not common); cannot and can't are usual in such contexts."

So, is it a generational thing? Only in the sense that younger people rarely think to inflict their linguistic preferences on others. But if the question is whether this has changed, indeed, it has, just not within the lifetime of the father. Lot in the sense of a large number goes back to at least 1812 which is not all that long after it was first attested in the meaning that the father prefers.

Refuting anti-translationist propaganda

Over on the TESL-L mailing list, Mert Bland, Dean of Graduate Studies at CBU (That's Central Buganda University, not Christian Brothers University), is making his same tired claims about vocabulary teaching. One of my responses, which garnered a lot of positive response, is reprised here:

The folks who buy into the anti-memorisationist agenda tend to be the same who hold anti-translationist ideologies. Yet the arguments they marshal in their attempts to rationalise these extreme positions do not bear scrutiny and, to the extent that they are true, can usually be applied equally to learning vocabulary without the L1.

Take, for example, the recent claims by Mert:
"no concept in the the target language is a direct translation of a concept in the native language."

First of all, this is simply false. Admittedly, some words will not overlap well. However, to the extent that any two native speakers of a given language share a common understanding, the meaning of the vast majority of nouns, verbs, and adjectives will be the same in translation. For example, 'book' will have a one-to-one translation in almost every major natural language.

Anti-translationists will say "gotcha! What about book used as a verb, as in 'book him for murder'?"

The *noun* 'book' will have a one-to-one translation.

"Ha!" say the anti-translationists. "My concept of book includes electronic books, while that of pre-industrial hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforest does not." To which we calmly reply, "nor does that of my grandfather, though he is a native speaker of English."

Not only is the argument false, but even if one were to imagine it to be true, it is only relevant if we take the position that it is best to fully and accurately specify the meaning of a word when teaching/learning it. Yet, clearly, here, translation does a better job--not the straw-man single-word translation example being bandied about here in the form of English 'leg' to Japanese 'ashi', but the use of the L1 to translate AND explain the word. English synonyms and paraphrases will typically be only as good as, and likely worse than the L1, and are almost sure to be less comprehensible to many learners.

Mert goes on to argue:
We try to bifurcate the languages, completly separate retes. This can't be done if individual vocabulary items are tied together in the two concept clusters.

This takes a very naive view of the brain and attempts to make arguments based on ideas that even neurolinguistic experts are unclear about. It also conveniently ignores the fact that after the teacher spends 10 minutes gesticulating, explaining in English, and searching for props, the students will finally go, "Aha! He means (L1 word)." This activation of the L1 translation is almost certainly automatic and unavoidable in most cases, yet it is just what this teacher was trying to avoid.

Mert also makes the point that "A connection once made is hard to break; these things tend to fossilize."

If this is true, then it is a good reason to make sure the connection is the correct one by using the L1 and not a mistaken guess about what a given pantomime means. If it is false, then there is no reason to think that the gradual changes and refinements of a meaning that accrete with exposure to the word in multiple contexts will be any more difficult if one starts with an L1 connection than if one could somehow begin with a pure, non-linguistic concept.

(Please note that I'm not arguing that teachers should be experts in the L1s of all of their learners, just that they should allow the L1 its place when possible.)

Real gone difference

I was somewhat taken aback recently when a disucssion on the ETJ mailing list brought to light the different interpretations of the 's in "Where's my car? It's gone." It turns out that most North American speakers of English interpret this as "My car is gone?" while British speakers tend to parse it as "My car has gone."

In the NA interpretation (and my own), gone is an adjective meaning "to be no longer in a particular place". Furthermore, in NA English, the present perfect construction favoured by the Brits is interpreted to mean that the car itself left, but that's discounted as the car can't leave of its own accord. Strictly speaking, this use of go is not limited to animate agents; yet the agent must at least appear to move on its own. Consider:

• The mist is gone. (The mist seems to move of its own volition; the wind and sun are unseen.)
• The pain is gone. (We view pain as an entity which comes and goes.)
• The bus is gone. (The bus driver is an integral part of the bus and can be expected to be inside.)

The British interpretation takes the verb go to mean disappear, which is indeed the sense that the NAs have of the adjective, but don't accept for the verb.

I wonder how many other contractions are masking interpretations that have gone their separate ways.

No Ojibwe owns a skunk

The linguist Bill Bright, has passed away. While I was reading through some of his talks, I came across the following story about Edward Sapir.

"Examples presented in the grammar should be based as much as possible on naturally occurring utterances, not on strings of morphemes or words which the linguist creates himself, or obtains by direct elicitation from speakers. To whatever extent examples fail to represent natural utterances, they fail to represent the cultural context of the language. Sapir is said to have asked an Ojibwe to say “my skunk, your skunk” etc., in order to test a morphophonemic hypothesis; but the Indian rightly refused , saying “No Ojibwe owns a skunk.” The fact that no Ojibwe owns a skunk is a cultural fact which should not be falsified."

Search terms

I will admit to regularly and vainly checking my blog hit count. Part of the report tells me how you got here. Many users find their way over from Language Log, but it's amazing to me how many of you arrive because you've searched for wake woke woken waked awakened or some combination of the above (which I discussed here). In fact, of the past 25 viewers, fully 1/5 of you came because something has awoken in you a curiosity about these verbs. And this has been going on consistently since mid September when I brought it up.

Who knew woke was such a burning issue?

Asking why

The Toronto Star has been running a series of promotions with the tag line, "ask why". Unfortunately, their misuse of numbers might lead many to ask why they are promoting their inability to explain research results and numbers.

On Saturday, they wrote that "A comparison of seven Ontario municipalities has shown that Torontonians are by far the most diligent recyclers in the province." This could only be true if it had already been established that those seven were the top seven in the province.

Today, the "ask why" promo makes the suspiciously exact yet meaningless assertion that "242 new immigrants call Toronto home." No time period is mentioned.

[They now have corrected the second ad to read "242 new immigrants call Toronto home every day." (my emphasis)]

They live in what?

One of my students submitted a rough draft recently with the sentence, "While coffee makers take large profits, coffee farmers must live in extreme puberty."

Probably the Cupertino effect.

(Please, note, my intention here is not to disparage my students, who are writing in a foreign language.)

Popular graded readers

And speaking of extensive reading, our department has recently been given a bit of money to expand our catalogue of graded readers, so I asked the library to get me the circulation data on our existing books. Although we have a variety of titles, the top 20 were almost all from the Oxford Bookworms series, and most of them were classics. Here are the top 10 (from most popular to least)

Oliver Twist Dickens, Charles
Sense and sensibility Austen, Jane
Tess of the D'ubervilles Hardy, Thomas
Far from the Madding crowd Hardy, Thomas
Great expectations Dickens, Charles
Wuthering heights Bronte, Emily
Ring, The Smith, Bernard
David Copperfield Dickens, Charles
Little women Alcott, Louisa
Three men in a boat Jerome, Jerome

Of these, only The Ring is not from OUP (it's a Penguin title). The other two in the top 20 that are not OUP are The Client, also Penguin, and Help! from Cambridge.

Anybody care to share their students (or their own) favorites?

Extensive Reading for the budget conscious country

On the Extensive Reading mailing list, Dave Kees floated the idea today that China (or likely any developing country) could use extensive reading exclusively. (Extensive reading (ER) involves reading tens of thousands of words per week in the target language. This is made possible by keeping the difficulty of the material largely within the comprehension level of the reader, usually by controlling the vocabulary of the text.)

Dave suggests that, even if ER weren't quite as effective as using a variety of teaching methods,

"China should think about what the impact would be and the cost savings be (sic) if they gave Comprehensible Input a wholehearted tryout, especially considering the difficulty of many high-maintenance foreign teachers and the trouble, heat and friction of the age-old academic battles between grammar-translationalists and communicative approachers."

If I had all the freedom in the world to set up my ideal program, I don't think I'd go for 100% ER, or even 100% ER with accompanying audio, as Dave is suggesting. Still, if you look at the cost/benefit ratio of French classes in English-speaking Canada or of English classes in Japan, it would be hard to do worse.